Archive for the ‘digital marketing’ Category

Ten years ago, four authors came together to start a new conversation about marketing. The result was a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto and with it, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger nailed 95 Theses on the door of the Internet and challenged us all to wake up to a transformation underway in how companies and people engage in markets.

Their Ideas have grown up to become a reality during past ten years. Today markets in corporate space and consumer products have begun to recognize that they have to listen to their customers. Their recognition of collaborative online communities has created new opportunities for them.

Those who are interested in identifying real world applications should listen to a weekly podcast. It attempts to put into practical, usable terms the methods of implementing the ideas laid out in The Cluetrain Manifesto. Three interviews available at BlogTalkRadio provides summary of reflection on ideas proposed by Cluetrain Manifesto.

There are several initiatives showing adoption of these practices in the nonprofit world. Increasingly organizations are realizing that initiatives which ignore the people behind the computers are going to fail.

Call to action is not new for Nonprofit. In-fact some of them can’t survive without it. It would be interesting to find out how emerging ecology of conversation have begun shaping call to action and role of professional Nonprofits in this changed environment. Internet profoundly changes the way people interact with nonprofit. Creative uses of these challenges have created new opportunities for nonprofit work.

Describing how non-profit and other charities have been raising support for their it argues that “Charities, political parties and affinity groups all rely on participation from people who share the same beliefs and ideals. But recruiting and fund raising are largely stuck in the pre-Internet era.”

Agape wants to harness principle of viral new startup to increase their effectiveness.

Those interested in these ideas may want to check out here to find out more information in future.

Issue of user-generated content (including online forums, blogs, videos) has begun becoming part of Non-profit/social justice organizations work. Some high profile groups like Amnesty International, Witness, Human Rights Watch and others have expanded their use of YouTube and working to expand their outreach and/or share user generated content on specific campaign.

Recent example include Close Guantanamo campaign by Amnesty International. Make Some Noise – Amnesty International. Close to 100 video clips in various languages (most less than a minute long) are posted on YouTube. It does manage to provide visibility to voices of ordinary people.

Responding to this emerging trend Witness started a pilot project on Global Voices (as a subset of the functionality of their forthcoming Human Rights Video Hub) some time in September 2006. This page allows users to “Watch and comment on human rights video from around the world curated by WITNESS”. Commentaries along with these clips on Global Voices add extremely useful context and some analysis while users what these clips. Thus Witness is using some what different model than used by Amnesty International in their Say ‘Close Guantánamo’ on camera! initiative.

Use of this medium is no longer limited to English. During last quarter of 2006 Farsi Tube was launched in the U.S. FarsiTube is a video sharing community targeted towards Iranians, and has all kinds of videos about Iran and Iranian culture.

According to China Daily report (February 1st) “almost half of China’s Internet users were found to be focusing in on video-sharing websites. There are hundreds of websites offering webcast and podcast services in Chinese. Tudou.com is considered to be the most popular video-sharing site.

In short any evaluation of user-generated content must include all such global initiatives.